All blog posts are cross posted

Monday, January 11, 2010

Are We Safer, Stronger, Smarter?

Several articles I read this morning are on how President Obama is just not good for our security, economy or healthcare. Here are some of them:
From Human EventsObama, the Weak Horseby Jed Babbin

Soon upon us will be the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration. It’s time to ask, are we safer or in more danger than we were a year ago?

By every objective measure -- what we know about Islamic terrorism, its intentions and capabilities -- the answer is no. We are far less safe now than we were then.

To ask how much danger are we in is fatuous. You may as well ask, “[H]ow much danger is there”? The president has taken actions that -- again objectively -- have increased our vulnerability tremendously. Two of the actions he took immediately after taking office prove the point. And the actions he and Attorney General Eric Holder have since taken only increase the danger. One of the first things the president did on taking office was to ban the “enhanced interrogation methods” used successfully during the Bush administration to gain current, actionable intelligence from terrorist prisoners....

....Last week, White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan said that we would still, on a case by case basis, release Gitmo detainees to Yemen....

.... Keeping Gitmo open -- and subjecting the enemy combatants there who can be tried to military commissions -- would keep us safer. But Obama rejects both ideas....

....Obama is a weak horse. His weakness is the weakness of all liberals, just as Ronald Reagan defined it: “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”...

The president believes we can talk terrorists out of terrorism. He might as well believe he could talk the Neytiri character in “Avatar” out of being blue. He has no understanding of how powerful the Islamofascist ideology is, how deeply-rooted or widespread.

From American Thinker Pam Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog:
Obama Aids the Enemy He Will Not Name

White House National Security Adviser James Jones warned that Americans would feel "a certain shock" after reading the report on the Islamic jihadist who hid bombs in his crotch and tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 in Detroit on Christmas Day.

The loudest (deafening, actually) part of Obama's remarks Thursday on the war on the West is what he didn't say. Not once in Obama's self-aggrandizing speech on the Muslim Christmas bomber did he ever mention jihad or Islam.

And that is whom we are at war with.

To say that al-Qaeda alone is the enemy is just more obfuscation and deception. It's bureaucratic boilerplate.

Go read it all!Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (Simon & Schuster).From AP via Yahoo News:In Hasan case, superiors ignored their own worriesBy Richard Lardner

A Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan's medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.

The picture emerging from the review ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one of supervisors who failed to heed their own warnings about an officer ill-suited to be an Army psychiatrist, according to information gathered during the internal Pentagon investigation and obtained by The Associated Press. The review has not been publicly released. Read it all here.

So many families would be whole today had we not had PC, Obama pushed policies that said we should not pursue security questions just because someone was an Isalmist.

There needs to be a housecleaning at the very troubled Justice Department, and the top echelons of the Civil Rights Division is the right place to start. Its division chief - a presidential appointee - and its highly politicized senior career employees promote liberal ideology more than they enforce the law.

The latest imbroglio concerns two of the division's top career lawyers, the ones whom the Obama team chose to run the division until controversial nominees Thomas Perrelli and Thomas Perez could be confirmed. The two officials, Loretta King and Steven H. Rosenbaum, were heavily involved (along with Mr. Perrelli) in dropping an already-won voter-intimidation case against several members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, and both were responsible for other, questionable race-based decisions. On Dec. 30, a federal district court in Kansas sanctioned them for misconduct. Read it all.

President Obama blamed "the system" for failing to stop al Qaeda's Christmas Day bombing plot. The weakness with that excuse is that Mr. Obama fails to connect the dots between the systemic failure and his administration's year-long record of destroying the morale of the intelligence community.

The intelligence process works in large part because of trust. A reliable sense of confidence must exist between superiors and subordinates, agents and sources, and the intelligence community and policy makers. Without trust, people will not take the risks needed to do their jobs successfully.

Mr. Obama has destroyed this sense of trust. On his watch, the intelligence community has suffered a year of body blows. He made great theater of signing an executive order closing the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In April, the president authorized the release of the so-called "torture memos" on enhanced interrogation techniques used against detainees, and suggested that Congress establish a bipartisan review panel to look into the authorization of extraordinary interrogation methods.